From Joel, "I'm getting the recommended eight hours of sleep every night, but constantly feel exhausted both when I wake up and throughout the day. I've been watching videos on the importance of limiting screen time before bed and I think I may be a culprit for my bad sleep. Do you have any advice on ways to reduce screen time before bed as I find it very addicting and hard to break that habit?" I love the irony of watching videos about how to reduce screen time.

I imagine him, Joel, up late, late into the night watching videos about how to not watch videos before bed. All sorts of contradictions and irony in the online productivity space as the channels are exactly the causes of productivity issues in the first place. All right, Joel, a couple of things here.

I mean, first of all, of course, if you're tired throughout the day and you're getting enough sleep, if you actually are getting enough sleep, go back to the opening segment of the show, make sure that you're not excessively context shifting. Some of that tiredness may actually be mental fatigue and not actual rundown tiredness.

So you want to just set up your day to be less unnecessarily exhausting, but if we're going to focus specifically on this issue of your sleep being disrupted, I mean, I agree that good sleep hygiene can help and going on to, I think the right way to think about it is highly salient, highly distracting, highly arousing content should not be consumed near bed.

So anything where it's coming through an app that makes money by how much time you look at it, avoiding that, I think is important. So you should not go on YouTube before bed. You should not go on to Instagram or Twitter or TikTok. Anything that's attention engineered is going to be a problem because, again, these services, those services work services you don't pay to use work by getting you to look at the service longer.

So they're going to be pressing buttons within your brain to get a response that makes you very engaged and aroused emotionally and wanting to actually come back and keep watching more. That's not a great state to be in if you want to go to bed. So if you're going to be looking at a screen before bed, a general rule of thumb here is look at things where they don't make money off of you spending more time on it.

So if there's a The Office on Peacock, like I watch an episode or two of The Office because it's comforting and it's dumb, that's going to have much less of a negative impact, right? These streaming services make money by you paying a subscription fee, so they want to make sure there's stuff on there you like, but they don't particularly care if you binge for seven hours in a row or not, they're just, here's, we have a bunch of shows we think you'll like.

So there's a real difference. They both seem like screens, but watching a comforting, somewhat boring show could actually help your brain calm down in a way that watching TikTok videos or following YouTube recommendations might actually get your brain fired up. So the intent of the platform, is it an engagement or is it customer experience, makes a difference on how it's going to affect your sleep.

The other thing I want to throw in here, that's sort of the curve ball, is another common sleep disruptor is not necessarily what you do right before bed, but what's happening inside your head. If your head is keeping track of a lot of open loops, to use a term from David Allen, tasks that you're responsible for, projects you need to work on, ideas that might lead to cool opportunities.

If you have a lot of these things that exist primarily in your head, and if you forget about them, it's going to be a problem. Your brain is going to have a hard time falling asleep because it feels like the juggler where the things it's juggling are very fragile and valuable and doesn't want to drop anything, so it has to keep moving.

So ironically, one of the biggest things you can do to help you sleep at night is be better about how you control your work during the day, being better about how you shut down your work at the end of the day. Organizational systems that are built around notions like full capture and planning.

So every task that you need to do that you've committed to is captured in a trusted location that you review regularly, so your brain doesn't have to keep track of it. It makes a huge difference for your sleep. Multiscale planning. I have a plan for my season, which gets turned into plans for my week, which gets turned into plans for my day, so that my brain doesn't have to just keep thinking, "Hey, what am I working on?

What should I be working on? Should I be thinking more about this or that?" Helps you sleep. Having in general a good shutdown routine. Okay, the day is over. Before I shut down work, let me check all of the inboxes, my email, my plan, making sure that everything has a place, anything that came up has been written down.

I know what's happening tomorrow. There's nothing I need to be keeping track of. We have a good plan. Everything's captured. Great. I can check that shutdown complete checkbox in my time block planner or have a ritual or phrase I say, and so later, if my mind starts to get ruminative about work, I can say, "No, no, no.

I checked that checkbox in my time block planner. I said that phrase. That means I successfully reviewed and shut down all open loops. I don't have to worry about things till tomorrow." That makes a big difference for sleep. All right, so to summarize, we have a couple different things going on here.

Be careful about what screens you expose yourself to before bed. It's probably going to be easier if you have a bedtime screen habit to just change what you look at than it will be to just cold turkey stop looking at a screen before bed. Just shift your screens to things that's not emotionally salient or emotionally arousing.

And then care a lot about how you organize your work, open loops, shutdowns, and multi-scale planning. And finally, make sure that some of your daytime exhaustion is not actually from context shifting as opposed to sleep disruption. Those are my three points, Joel. I think all three of those things combined will make a difference.

I'm noticing, Jesse, we got, not only do we have a bunch of J names in a row, but the next name is literally JJ. It's as if we go through our questions alphabetically. I like it. Unfortunately, it's the last of the J names. I wish we had more. But anyways, let's get, after John and Joel, let's get rolling with what JJ has to ask us.

Yep. So JJ has to say, "I'm constantly feeling stressed during the evenings when I'm not at work because I feel like I'm wasting time. I want to constantly be improving myself, but I also want to take time to do fun things, video games, see friends, et cetera. What should I do?" Right.

So this could be an issue for people who care a lot about productivity writ large is evenings can be stressful. It can be stressful because if you're not doing anything structured, you feel just unnerved. You practice multi-scale planning. Your workday is time block planned. It's connected to a weekly plan and a seasonal plan, and it can feel unnerving to be just around, feel unproductive.

But then you're worried about like, well, what do I want to do is if I treat my day like my workday, that's exhausting because it's also really hard to be very structured during the workday. So this can be in a dilemma like JJ is in as well. So the two things I recommend in this situation is one, clear separation between work and non-work.

Okay. So clear shutdown routine. We just talked about this in the answer that I gave to Joel in the previous question. So you really can shut down work. That'll help your mind leave the work productivity mindset of we are constantly trying to keep track of what's going on and making sure nothing's being misplaced and we're making good use of your time.

You want to clear shutdown. So your mindset can shift. But the second thing I would advise is that especially if you're an organized person, having no plan is overrated. We often tell ourselves that the solution to maybe the exhaustion we feel from work is nothingness. The goal is if I could just have nothing to do, then no plan, no intention.

That will be the opposite of being, having too much to do and I'm going to find relaxation and rejuvenation actually does not work that way for a lot of people. Especially if you're organized, having nothing to do, having no plan is stressful and you get that unnerving feeling that you talk about.

So what's the right thing to do? Sketch a plan, but make sure that plan is varied and rejuvenating and interesting. The problem that people have, what stresses us out about work is not the fact that we have things to do. It's not the fact that we have a plan.

It's just that we have too many things to switch back and forth behind us because the work is hard. The work is stressful. It's not the plan itself. It's what the plan is actually is in the plan. Work is hard. You sketch a plan after you're shut down. It shouldn't be a detailed time block plan and be like, yeah, I want to get a reading session in and work out and then why don't we watch this show with the kids that I've been reading about?

I think it's going to be special and I want to make sure that I have a, go for a walk before we get ready for bed. You sort of sketch a plan of things that are meaningful and useful for the family and useful for yourself and varied and rejuvenating, and it's not a tight minute by minute plan.

You're actually going to feel much better about that. So again, the key to get away from the stress of a busy work day is not to significantly reduce what you do. It's not the significantly reduce the idea of having a plan is to make the things you do much better, to make the things that you've planned to do fun or interesting or useful to the world beyond the world of work and completely unconnected.

So shut down work, shift to non-work mode, but then say, I want to hit the pillow proud tonight. Like what do I want to do with my time that makes this an evening that I'm proud of? And it has nothing to do with productivity. It's not how do I achieve this or get ahead of this?

It's like, how do I like get time to read this book I really like? How do I get some one-on-one time with like my oldest son who I haven't seen recently? You want to make intentional use of your time, which is separate from some notion of optimizing time or maximizing output.

So doing little can be stressful. I mean, that's the, there's so many books, Jesse, there's a while where do nothing, how to do nothing. The art of doing nothing. It was this whole notion of what we need to do is nothing. Doing nothing stresses a lot of people out.

Yeah. Like humans don't like to do nothing. Yeah. Because people are like really afraid of being bored. Yeah. And boredom is actually a useful human emotion, right? Yeah. We feel such a strong, distasteful, uh, emotional reaction that doing nothing is because we're evolved to actually want to be doing things.

That's what drives humans to unlike a cat who's completely happy. If I can lay in the sun for seven hours and I'm a cat, it's a good day, right? Cats don't get bored. Humans do, but that is the drive that's like, okay, well, what else are we going to do?

Well, I don't know. Let's invent fire or organize a political system or invent religion. Like the boredom is part of what drove humans that take advantage of this larger brain that we grew. Yeah. So, you know, we shouldn't, boredom is important indicator. The key is, I mean, again, people are not stressed out by doing things, they're stressed out by what they're doing.

Yeah. The reasonableness of what they're doing, whether they have enough time to do it, the, the actual demands of the work they're doing. That's what's stressful. Not the doing itself. I mean, you can stop your work and be reading and woodworking and, you know, movies and watching sports, all sorts of things you can do, which are things, but they're very different than work.

It's really the content of activity. Not so much the, uh, planning around activity. Planning itself is not too stressful. Yeah. Actually Lex had, um, Yuval Harari on like a couple weeks ago and I listened to that. They were talking about like civilization and boredom and stuff like that. Oh, interesting.

Yeah. Yeah. Yuval is real big on, um, the conceptual, the cognitive conceptual developments in human evolution that just unlocked everything. Yeah. I'll listen to that one. Yeah. Yeah. It was just before the Isaacson one. I think. Um, I saw someone the other day attribute sapiens to me. That's pretty good.

They said Cal Newport's book sapiens. I sold like millions and millions of copies. Yeah. Yeah. I was like, I like that. I suppose. I mean, it's probably bad news for Yuval Harari, but I guess good news for me. I was like, I'll take it. I'll take it. Hey, if you liked this video, I think you'll really like this one as well.